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Interesting, apparently the source also includes a (modified) version of the PUC Lua VM. Why don't they just generate bytecode for the existing VM and leave it as is (unless the modified version somehow would significantly increase performance)? What changes were necessary to the original VM to implement the language?

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Some features like break N and default function args seem to be incompatible with the vanilla lua vm.

I think that would be achievable with plain PUC Lua bytecode; it's actually just a jump. The same for default function arguments; the VM doesn't actually care how many arguments the caller pushes on stack, and providing default values is easy to implement for the caller.

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